Gone With the Wind: The Video Game

[Thyroid]

Edit: In retrospect, this was the stupidest fucking thing. I'm ashamed I wrote this.

Edited October 19, 2011 by Kroms

[elmuerte]

tl;dr

short answer: no

long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[Thyroid]

Is that better?

I'll try making it shorter in the morning...

[brkl]

Obviously I can't give any real answers, but what is clear is that games are the only way to tell a story through active participation and that is the strength of the medium. So compare Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse.Now and Far Cry 2. They each at least try to communicate more or less the same thing, but through different media. For Far Cry 2, the desolation and brutality of that world and the hypocrisy of everyone involved is communicated through a story made up of individual player actions.

[vimes]

This subject is kinda why Video game is a source of enthusiasm to me and why I'm working in the field; so this message might get long and off topic.

Games can be written as movies, as books, or as plays - it's more than fine - but these will rarely be both very good as games and still win the comparison against their model. It's a limitation of the medium : interactivity comes in the way of maintaining the unique flow needed by these linear experiences. So, I don't believe in "The Magnificient Ambersons - The movie - The game", simply because the exact point of view it adopts can't provide activities that are as meaningful in terms of story as they are in terms of lasting interaction.

However, what I do believe in is "The changing social power game of the 20th century's US - The game". The difference is that it's a game set in a defined universe that tackles the same problematic as the Amberson but uses tools which are interactivity friendly or, better yet, which are strengthen by interactivity.

Thus, my bet is that the breakthrough will come from a title that manages to carry out a defined thematic and trigger the same intellectual or emotional process for all players, while providing gameplay and story experiences that fits their actions, i.e. being nearly unique for all of them.

For this, and in the same way novelists appeared because writing novel was different from writing poems and plays, the Video game medium needs to spawn video games writers, if it's ever going to find its own way as a narrative tool.

What I think we need are people that can understand why a kind of narrative structure creates such and such effects, why an event triggered at a point in the story carries a peculiar meaning across, why an activity and a point of view offered to the player change the player assumption of the world ... and build narrative system out of it. Structuralists in fact.

For instance, say you create templates of scenes that carry the point of 'humiliation due to having to conform to you social status untold rule' and at one point of the game, you need to get this point across.

First thing you do is choose a template via some criteria (can I cast all the characters of this template, have I already used it, is it carrying a point I've already conveyed or don't want to convey?)

Depending on how you want this point to be carried across (is it toward the player, or another character) or with which strength, you'll put the player in a certain role, cast other characters/object as the remaining ones, set it in space and time that both makes sense and bolster the intentions and define a point of view (when/where is told from, when/where is it compared to the talking point of view, who's telling) ... lot's of different instantiation, one of them being the exact Eugene/Isabel flashback from the movie; but you only show this one if it makes sense in the player's experience.

The closest profile we've got to the one which could do this are the Bioware guys (with, as best example, the Mass Effect smuggling mission Chris is always mentioning) : they offer an array of comprehension of a series of events depending on what the player does, in which role he cast himself ... but they're still crafting the story as a huge tree of story arcs anchored in time, space and featuring definite actors and props. The next step is to go further in abstraction and build story patterns whose instantiation in a certain context is controlled by preset authorial need.

This structuralist approach to build storytelling model is not new, (it all goes back to Propp, Levy-Strauss and Barthes in the 40's) and academics have been playing with it successfully since the 70s : automated story generation reached a peek more than a decade ago with systems like UNIVERSE or MINSTREL... but the integration of a real time disruptor (the player) is still a huge headache. Most of it is due to the fact that other correlated issues are yet to be solved, starting with "Can we model the player intentions from its actions so that we can offer a proper response?" or "When do we know the narrative is going to break and to which extend should we try to avoid the breaking, to fix it, to maintain the current story structure or to drop it altogether and create a brand new?"

Also, because this approach pretends to offer the player meaningful and diversified activities, it is gameplay centric. Kay?